Mohamed Sabry Bastawy (b. 1983) is an Egyptian artist working across sculpture, painting and drawing, whose practice centres on the human figure and its place within a larger social whole. Informed by his training as a sculptor and his Upper Egyptian heritage, his work approaches the individual through ideas of kinship, community and collective life. The collective has remained fundamental to Bastawy’s practice. Rather than treating the figure as an autonomous subject, he is interested in the bonds that form between people and the structures of dependence that hold communities together. His movement between sculpture and painting is equally integral to this approach: a sculptural sensitivity to mass, balance and physical presence carries into his two-dimensional work, giving the body a sense of weight even as its proportions are altered. References to Upper Egyptian culture and inherited forms of storytelling enter this practice as part of a lived cultural vocabulary, grounding Bastawy’s increasingly imaginative world in recognisable forms of social experience. Born in Rashid in 1983 to a family with roots in Luxor, Bastawy graduated with distinction and honours from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Alexandria University, where he later joined the Sculpture Department. He has participated in numerous exhibitions and sculpture symposia in Egypt and internationally, including the Aswan International Sculpture Symposium, and has received several national awards, including prizes at Egypt’s Youth Salon. His work is held in collections including the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art, the Aswan Open Museum and Bibliotheca Alexandrina.